----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------Thanks, Rob, for getting the ball rolling. I was going to wait for a response to Adam's questions but let me go ahead and chime in briefly. What everyone is after, it seems, is what Esposito in _Bios_ calls an "affirmative" biopolitics. Where people tend to get carried away is in embracing a bit too unproblematically the assertion in Foucault, and especially in the late Deleuze's reading of Foucault and the "follow ups," as it were, in the texts on "control society," that "resistance is on the side of life." I don't think this is where Rob is going, even though he shares the desire. Here, one can only say, I think, that resistance _may_ be on the side of life, for reasons having to do with what Foucault calls the "aleatory" body and what Esposito calls "flesh." But the actual political effect or amplitude of a particular act of biopolitical resistance depends as much or more on the dynamic state of the social system in question as it does on the act itself. What will perturb it and how? How will it react and why? This is especially obvious in the case of the legal system, as Gunther Teubner has noted in his critique of Latour's idea of "political ecology." No doubt--and for the reasons that Rob notes--bioart and the deployment of "life" in it can serves as a site of resistance to the manipulation, canalization, commodification, and so on of "life" under biopolitics, but that will itself depend on all sorts of other factors that do not find their origin or cause in anything called "life." So this is a different way of taking our distance from the assumption that the biopolitical is always thanatopolitical.
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CaryWolfe Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor Department of English, MS-30 Founding Director, 3CT: Center for Critical and Cultural Theory RiceUniversity HoustonTX77251-1892 713-348-2601; -5991 _3ct.rice.edu_ Series Editor,/Posthumanities/ UniversityofMinnesotaPress http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/series/posthumanities
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